FriForma with Tristan Honsinger and Joel Grip at Vodnikova

“There is an unknown music. Hidden, to be discovered. Deciphered. There is a past, a now, and a coming. And there is something else. Out of time. Here are two spines – backbones of improvisation. Here’s the vast chatter. There’s an unknown music known to our inner ears. Here are fingerboards and jaws. Amplifying the balance between falling and not falling. Here are Tristan Honsinger and Joel Grip. A sonorous dance of extreme troubadours.”

Tristan Honsinger is a cello player active in free jazz and free improvisation. He is perhaps best known for his long-running collaboration with free jazz pianist Cecil Taylor and guitarist Derek Bailey. He studied at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, but by the seventies, the Trans-American had moved to Amsterdam and formed the Instant Composers Pool with drummer Han Bennink and radical pianist Misha Mengelberg. With this avant-jazz group, his music transcended the classical conservatory background he had and he began to incorporate wild, free improvisation, jazz, and European folk music into his cannon, not to mention a kinship with Bertolt Brecht theatre, which would put an edge on performances and recordings that take on experimental strategies, some of which include what could be considered violent attacks on the instrument. The range of emotions that is covered in a piece by Tristan Honsinger is striking in that it is very accessible for so-called avant-garde music. In the eighties, he recorded for the prestigious FMP label and in the nineties, for numerous recording companies, including Winter & Winter, I.C.P., and legendary jazz archivists Hat Hut from Switzerland.

For a number of years now, energetic double bassist, filmmaker and producer Joel Grip has played an important role for the new scenes of improvised music in Europe. As founder of Umlaut Records, he opened up for creative forms of organizing collectives of musicians and promoting their music internationally. Since 2003 he has been one of the main organizers of Hagenfesten in Dala-Floda, Sweden, a stand-alone festival, and quite frankly possibly the most pleasant venue for free improvised music not only in Sweden but in the whole of Europe. Few other places offer quite the same endearing combination of sophisticated musical risk-taking, and up-beat, social get-together. Grip’s musicianship is informed by a similar knack for welding musical sophistication with social communication, often with an analog film camera at hand. With a handful of short films Joel Grip met mexican filmmaker Mauricio Hernández and shortly the film production company Umlicht was established. They are right now working on their third and forth feature film together. Umdicht is amplifying the pencil of Joel Grip’s hand, partly through the irregular issue of Lösa Blad and partly in the future release of books.